More on OLPC later. I have opinions on that I urgently want to share, but not to day.

Think that $250 million is a lot of money even to a G-8 country? $250 million represents almost exactly what Halliburton was reimbursed when the U.S. Army decided, in February 2006, not to dispute the company’s cost accounting, even though the Pentagon’s own auditors had identified those costs as potentially excessive.

I’ve been playing around with Tor and Vidalia for a while now. Tor is a tool for hiding browsing information and Vidalia is the management tool for the “onion skin” routers that one bounces through when using Tor.

The Tor/Vidalia and, now, Torpark, remind me a little bit of TriangleBoy, which was a tool developed in the to anonymously surf the web. TriangleBoy was developed with money from the NSA.

Anyway, Torpark is really cool in that it is less of a hassle than Tor/Vidalia bundle. I will give a more thorough review later, but for now there seems to be a few sites that have picked up on its release.

Black Hat 2006 USA starts tomorrow in Los Vegas and has an interesting schedule, with sponsors including Microsoft and Cisco. Apparently, Microsoft is showing off the security of Internet Explorer 7 and Vista at the show.

I would love to go to the conference. Perhaps next year…

If you’re interested in a taste, there are copies of the Power Point presentations from Black Hat 2006 Europe and Fed available, with audio archives forthcoming.

If you for some reason think that this is only for illegitimate root kiddies, think again. It can become an important part of your skillset, if you take the time.